A lesson to learn from Peter Jackson (or, stating the obvious, part infinity plus eight)

(Disclaimer: The following, while containing at least some opinions the author can sort of be said to hold, is more of an exploration than a presentation of ideas. It should all therefore be taken with a few barrelfuls of salt.)

So I’m watching the appendices on the Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition DVD, and as I’m watching Weta and the design team’s efforts to use design to hint at the great depth of the movie’s fictional world, I am again struck by the importance of this.

So many fantasy novels are totally ruined by their authors’ disregard for the importance of cultural, historical and geographical context. They seemingly pull all kinds of cool concepts out of their imaginations, without thinking about joining them properly in the physical realities of their worlds, and without giving much thought to how these things came to be. Or, it could well be that they know this themselves, but when they fail to convey this to their readers, it doesn’t much matter.

Take Tolkien himself, as an example. While his epic tale obviously holds great attraction due to several wide-reaching (some would even say universal) and polysemous themes, as well as the relatively thrilling adventure it sort of contains, it is my belief that what really raises Tolkien’s work above the pack is his world building. His, as I’m sure you’re all aware, was a literary project which sprang from his attempts at world building, or more specifically at conlanging, as it’s occasionally termed today. As a philologist he understood that languages don’t just exist as static objects in a vacuum, but rather that they’re dynamic, and that they are the products of specific material conditions. (Of course, he did his best to resist this, by joining his languages to peoples who have greater cause to be conservative than humans, namely Elves and Dwarves. But that’s another matter.)

To most people this is a rather banal truism, but despite of this it is startling how easy it seems to be to forget it when you’re attempting to create your own world. Very few people have managed what Tolkien has; to let their worlds and their stories be connected to each other at every possible juncture, reinforcing each other all the way through, instead of just at the points where it is convenient for the author’s ambitions for his or her stories.

In a way, I guess this is only natural. After all, most authors today, and perhaps especially mainstream fantasy ones, seem to see themselves as more storytellers than world-builders, letting their stories flow out first, and then making up the necessary world afterwards. Which is just fine, of course, but it undeniably undermines their endeavour to spin a great yarn when their worlds seem hollow, shallow and improvised.

As much as it pains me to say so, fanboy that I am, J.K. Rowling is a case in point here. True, she is a talented enough author to cover up most of her superficiality by filling her universe with all kinds of flights of fancy and by, at least in the later books, connecting her in-story contemporary dots a bit better. (All of which can be justified fairly easily, however.) But in my mind this isn’t far from filling your pool with colourful floating plastic animals in the hope that no one will notice that it’s no more than three inches deep.

That being said, Rowling is far from the worst, although you never get any kind of feel for the history of her world beyond the childhood or first rise of Voldemort, and even that’s quite thin. If I were to pick just a few examples from the fantasy I’ve read myself, instead of going after the supposedly even worse ones which I’ve luckily only heard other people dissing, Stan Nicholls stands out as a clear, eh, loser. His Orcs series is set in a world so dull and two-dimensional I am kind of surprised I even managed to get through it. He has some promising things in there, like the Eden-like origin-world of the orcs, where they lived happily in tribal communities slaughtering each other, until the evil witch came and abducted them for use in her armies. However, if my memory serves me right, the world in which most of the actual novels took place was pretty much just a grassy plain with some mountains, some xenophobic religious humans in the south, a few troll tribes in the middle, and an icecap and the witch’s stronghold in the north. In other words, absolutely nothing of interest, and a total absence of anything to actually explain why the hell all these people were fighting so hard for all this land. Sure, some agricultural issues were mentioned, and four or so magic gemstones, but the whole thing was so bereft of even the slightest hint of cultural and historical depth, I still get confused when thinking about it.

Another sad world-builder is Trudi Cavanan. Her Dark Magician trilogy has some references to such things as geopolitical circumstances and more or less ancient history, but beyond what’s necessary to rationalise the plot, there’s little there to foster a realistic feel and to help us readers suspend our disbelief.

Luckily, there are authors beyond Tolkien who excel at these things. Jack Vance’s Lyonesse trilogy has such an abundance of esoteric knowledge, so many historical relics of different kinds spread around, and such a firm sense of his fictional island’s geopolitical situation, it never feels all that fictional, in spite of it also being filled to the brim with whimsy and having a very stylised language. Gene Wolfe likewise interjects enough myths and vague indications into his Book of the New Sun to add to it whole new dimensions. And then there’s the fossilized sky scraper his Severian ascends on his way across a mountain range — a concept so mind-boggling it still sends shivers down my spine. Many more could be mentioned. Martin, who is a master at holding his cards close to his chest, but still gives us enough hints about his killer hand to make us sweat. Erikson, with his millions of years worth of backstory and his endlessly complex and awe-inducing interacting societies. Jordan and Goodkind, who can always pull an ace from one of their world-sized sleeves and who have both put down significant amounts of work into their creations. Lynch, who has a firm grip on the political and economical situation in his novels and is never shy to drop a hint of some exotic land or past we have yet to see. And Robin Hobb, who in spite of a relatively thin exposition of her world’s past still manages to evoke images of antiquity in her descriptions of the contemporary world of her Farseer and related novels.

Hmm. It seems I have forgotten where I was going with this. And that I have somehow ended up writing a small treatsie, when my ambitions when I set out was to pen down a few concise paragraphs. Well, anyway, I guess my more or less random ramblings were readable, and I guess I’ve kinda made my point , in there somewhere. Just to be sure though, perhaps I could reiterate my belief that the documentaries about the design of Middle Earth can serve as a reminder for most authors with fantasy aspirations? How it isn’t necessarily required to map out all the background of your world in the narrative itself, so long as you do so for your own benefit and manage to slip in a more or less subtle reference to it here and there?

It seems I have strayed into my Besserwisser mode again, so I should probably stop now. Before I insult anyone. More than I already have. Maybe I should practice what I preach and go take a look at my conlang project again, instead of making unfounded accusations against what is, after all, successful writers? Yeah.